You are in the twilight zone. How a person moderates his food and beverage intake only affects him. People try to make it out as a disease, which it isn’t, even though it can lead to diseases. Neither is drug addiction. It can’t be a disease, in my opinion, if the “cure” is simply to choose to do something less.

But let’s say fattiness is a disease. It still isn’t a public health issue. It still only affects the individual, and as such is cut off from the state’s police powers. Ah, but as you point out, we now have socialized medicine. Meaning everyone’s healthcare is everyone’s else’s business because everyone’s healthcare is a financial burden to the rest of us.

However, someone’s still paying for it. The money gots to come from somewhere. Mainly we decide who pays based on how much more they have than others (from each according to his abilities), or whether you buy unpopular things (sin tax), or how stupid you are (lottery). Why not make fat people lay for themselves? Or is that too much like the old system and common sense?

Here’s a perfect argument for why healthcare shouldn’t be socialized. Not only do undesirables cost us, we in fact encourage more fattiness, as there’s less incentive not to be fat. Yet you’re perfectly fine with socialism. It’s the immoderate who are at fault. But I don’t see why. You ought to embrace crackheads, sloths, sluts and satyrs, gluttons, and daredevils. You’ve guaranteed there’ll be more of them.

The only apparent alternative is to come at them with theaw from the other side. If socialism has removed consequences, then prohibition can remove opportunity. And we all know how well that works.

You may be comforted by fatties getting the business. They’ve abandoned Aristotlean truth and the Protestant ethic, committed one of the sevenly deadly sins, or whatever. But of course we won’t always go after the obviously socially unworthy. If what constitutes public health—and therefore the police powers—within a society with socialized medicine is whatever costs money to treat, or whatever can conceivably lead to costly medical consumption, then the government has power over every conceivable aspect of human life. Life is a disease for which death is the cure, as they say.